"No but you do, don't you? It certainly would be great to go with someone who knows his way around, or even if you don' t; two women traveling together begin to argue if they are alone too much."

"You argue?" he tried to restrain his smile. He knew how his gentle and probing eyes of sustained interest and a luminous smile made women love him, and so he looked away.

"How old is your sister?"

"Forty. She's older."

"No sisters sixteen years old or younger?" It was the vilest set of words beyond 'f.u.c.k' and 'American' that could be spoken to a French damsel, and he was startled to hear them spill out of his mouth. It was a slap against women for losing their beauty with increasing years, and a shallow and blatant disregard of the inner worth of a being. It was chauvinistic and repugnant, and it got him what he wanted.

"No, no younger sister. I've got to go!" As she was leaving him, she suddenly stopped and turned toward him abruptly. "You are ugly and pathetic. You know why? You went to America and America took over your thoughts. You are Asian and yet just like those war criminals. Why don't you just leave here and go back to America or better just go to h.e.l.l." Then there was perennial solitude once again.

Irritated by the stings of the ants that had crawled up his legs, and feeling a sense of compunction for having been so rude, he felt that he was now lost and wandering through the miasma and malaise of himself. It was so unbearable that he wanted to move away from the stupa and out of his inner self.

If he made a left to Main Street and then another left, he would be on the road that went near the Morning Market and toward the Arco de Triomph replica, Patuxay. To the right, he would be where he was--that plaintive temple museum that seemed to still be in mourning over the loss of the Emerald Buddha. Eventually, further in that direction would lead to government buildings, which were in the French colonial architecture, and then to the river; at least that was what the map indicated.

By the time the time the Patuxay monument was clearly visible, it had begun to rain heavily and he dashed toward it for shelter. Once there, he shook the water from his hair and clothes, and stared down at some flowers growing in a square pot at his feet. Feeling less fettered by the dampness, he then looked up at the deviant kinnari and Ramakien giants that were shaped intricately into the arched doorway, and sc.r.a.ped the mud off of his sandals. He remembered when he was five years old in America the faux pas of wiping his feet on a neighbor's doormat that had gotten him into trouble. He had believed then that that was what doormats were for. He again postulated that perhaps there really was no love--just people who having no extrinsic value in the universe at large clung to each other for meaning.

Then he suddenly heard in a Thai-Laotian dialect, "It's the Thai artist. Do you remember me."

33

The Laotian made the prayerful gesture of the wai which Nawin reciprocated. Then he said, "In the train, man. Remember?" He was trying to pierce through the fixed, glazed expression to pry into another mind and loosen the memories therein. His words could only be insolent if they were contemptuous, which they were not, and flagrant if he considered the age of the interlocutor, which he may not have done, and overall, the informality of it made Nawin feel equal instead of superior which was equivalent to a sense of being young once again. He remembered and smiled at his acquaintance and found himself amused at the fluctuation of demeanor in a given moment of time.

"Yes."

"I gave you a beer."

"Gave?" Nawin sneered playfully before a more cordial tone replaced it to patch over a stretch of silence. "I suppose you did in a way."

"Did or didn't?"

"Okay, you did."

"So here you are."

"Yes."

"You're a bit wet."

"Yes, I am."

"Are you cold?"

"No."

"You look tired. Are you tired?"

"Not really."

Boi guffawed at the lucid and hesitant utterances of the withdrawn, distrustful being and looked amused as though it were a game to him. "Well, I suppose you'll dry quickly enough when you're back inside. Do you have a hotel room?"

"Not yet."

He was ambivalent whether or not the Laotian meant to say, "Dee"

[good] in response. As the Laotian scrutinized the Thai, so Nawin did him. It seemed to him that a word had percolated from the Laotian's thoughts and yet the mouth bore nothing. The pursed lips seemed to incarcerate sound and the only thing to materialize was an imagined utterance and his own irritation at not even knowing such an insignificant item in the social sphere of man with absolute certainty. It was odd but useful, he thought, that the mind was able to distinguish that which was and was not real, especially when both were unreal in the objective measurement of pa.s.sing time, and that the mind noticed distinct positive attributes in each, rarely confusing the two.

In this case, however, he hardly knew whether it was a twitch of lips or a suppressed word. If the latter, he did not really know the word that it would have been but he still strongly believed the unspoken word if it were such to be "dee".

"My sister mentioned you many times. I said that you would probably never call and might not even cross the border." Nawin wondered if certain words were being withheld while others selectively released, but if so he could not see that this was different from anyone else, man or woman. And of a woman, her love might be proclaimed but never the wh.o.r.e within her that yearned to improve her situation in life as the most virtuous married status and money in one sense or another. Was he not missing life by a.n.a.lyzing everything, or was he giving weight and meaning to fleeting experience by the anchor of his ruminations? To live life fully, how much should be spent in the inward exploration of thought and outward action without being macabre or flippant and in both cases superfluous? This he hardly knew and also pondered.

"I almost returned to Bangkok this morning." He did not know why he was saying this. Like a model who would soon allow herself to be denuded there was something inside him wishing to strip off inner layers and be known to others as though knowledge of himself was not enough--as though even the palpable sense of himself in movement and thought was diminished and not reaffirmed by human interaction. Rocks moldered away and would do so all the more quickly if not reinforced by sediment; so, he said to himself, he could not be exempt of the same fate.

"You only arrived in Nongkai a day ago. Why were you thinking of returning?"

"I don't know" he said, and from the prevarication seconds of silence ensued with the discomfort of it, like the sweat, humidity, and filth of the open air clinging to his skin. As discourse was the only tangible means to gain an outline of another and the projected intertwined adumbration, the thick shadow of relationship that was the two, it was impossible to stay silent, refusing to disclose bits of himself; and as the present was at times a prototype for what would follow, an extension of the present that could be the pattern of his whole life. Needing to part the silence he said, "To see my wife if you must know."

"I must. The one who broke your arm?"

"And clavical. The same." The emphatic must enticed him and he smiled begrudgingly.

"You know what I think?"

"No, why would I?"

"That she doesn't exist."

"A le nah [huh]?"

"She doesn't exist."

His smile dissipated. Then he tilted his head down and his taut countenance became empty like the void in his head. "That's more or less what I decided and so I wandered here," he said dolefully.

For, oddly enough, he, as rich as he was, had come to this place of all places like an impecunious, malnourished refugee seeking any parlous state that might save him from starvation. Since Kimberly's death he could not find even scant viands or morsels of hope anywhere; and as all humanity competed for this resource, a prodigious amount was needed to feed their ambulatory corpses for the continuation of their hauntings, which would end in final stumbles. If there were a search light piercing a sliver of darkness for his sake in the solidity of his grief, the one hard substance in the random and furious changes of his life, how would he who was buried alive inside himself see it? And why would anyone else, busy in his or her solipsistic role, find enough humanity to save him?

If any light came to him now or had emanated heretofore, he was not aware of it. The border leading back to Thailand seemed a dark and opaque one-way journey sealed off to retrospective deviants. Thus, he was stranded in this swamp of Vientiane, Laos, without any chance of return. He was here in front of the Patuxay monument, this Archo de Triomphe created from money that the Americans had alloted for an airport.

"Lost?" There was only one object, himself, that was the meaning of this word, for the Laotian's eyes seemed to be peering into him with murky beams of light.

"Not entirely lost, no. Detached, I think, which makes me less lost really. Who knows? It feels different though--different from how I see it... not that you need to know that," he said condescendingly with a chuckle, believing that his ideas would not readily permeate into the obtuse mind of the laborer. Then he countered this claim by doubting if intelligence was innate.

It was in part the result of human will for transcendence, and in part provided by education fueled by money like everything else. The Laotian seemed to be sagacious enough to know his situation or perhaps this loneliness was so inordinate that he wanted to believe him as such. To be known was a vulnerability to be exploited especially when man's feelings wanted to avow friendship with he who saw him denuded, but to shy away from people was rather weak and craven.

"You should express yourself freely to your friends."

"Friends?" Nawin laughed. The laugh was mild with mild sarcasm, but it shook his body, reawakening the dull pain of his broken limb and this acute sense of falling from a precipice into an all engulfing abyss.

"What?" retorted the Laotian irascibly. "Are you laughing at me?"

"Well, yes, I'm sorry, but we don't hardly know each other."

"That could change."